ABSTRACT
Translation is a useful test case for examining the whole issue of the role of language in social life. Critiques of individual translations abound. But from the perspective of translation studies, what is needed is systematic study of problems and solutions by close comparison of source-language text (ST) and target-language text (TT) procedures. In this sense, texts can be seen as the result of motivated choice: producers of texts have their own communicative aims and select lexical items and grammatical arrangement to serve those aims. By distinguishing formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence as basic orientations rather than as a binary choice, Eugene Nida shifts attention away from the sterile debate of free versus literal towards the effects of different translation strategies. The view of translating concerns the nature of poetic discourse and whether or not it is translatable from one language into another. For many translators of religious texts, first loyalty is at all times with the source text.
